The uninspired comedy Buffaloed takes a handful of gags and uses them over and over again to fill its feature length. The way the locals of Buffalo, NY speak is one of those gags. They way they look is another. And that’s really about it. The classic film Fargo also pokes fun at the way its characters speak. But there’s so much more under the surface of that film. Buffaloed is a one-note comedy that ends up feeling disposable.
Set in Buffalo, NY, the debt-collection capital of the world, Peggy Dahl is determined to be successful and break out of the chain of poverty in which she was raised. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother pays the bills (just barely) by running an unlicensed beauty salon out of her house. (Ten cent wing night at the local bar – this is Buffalo, remember – helped keep Peg and her brother fed on their mother’s tight budget when they were growing up.)
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Legendary filmmaker Howard Hawks’ definition of what makes a “good movie” was pretty simple: “Three great scenes, no bad ones.” By that definition, director Richard Linklater’s new movie, Everybody Wants Some, comes close. There are no bad scenes, but by my count there are only two great ones. Linklater himself has been quoted as saying the movie is a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 near-classic* film Dazed and Confused, so it’s instructive to compare the two.
Everybody Wants Some doesn’t reach the dizzying highs of its predecessor because of its focus. If you aren’t familiar with Dazed and Confused, that picture’s core was an ensemble of misfits and oddballs on the last day of school in May 1976. (Or, to use the parlance of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig’s seminal television show that Linklater’s movie likely inspired, the freaks and geeks entering their first or last years of high school.) Junior-high student and baseball pitcher Mitch was the audience surrogate in that film. He was tormented over the course of the movie by some of the newly minted seniors who relished the opportunity to haze the incoming freshmen using a giant paddle. Ben Affleck played the most assholish of this group, O’Bannion, and it’s particularly satisfying when he gets his comeuppance.
I bring up that group of jerks because their college counterparts are at the center of Everybody Wants Some. Their edges have been softened considerably, but these college jocks act like masters of their universe, because they are. Their preoccupations are what you’d expect them to be, the three B’s: baseball, beer, and bangin’, not necessarily in that order. Because that’s who and what the movie devotes its time to, there is an emotional resonance that is conspicuously missing, particularly when compared to Dazed and Confused.
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